One way of practicing the philosophy of the novel is to analyse aesthetics, literature, fiction, narrative and novel as concepts, with regard to necessary and sufficient conditions of usage. In this kind of practice, not much is said about the concept of the novel since this is not an approach suited to dealing with genre, or at least genre has not been dealt with much as part of this approach. The first way is Analytic aesthetics applied to the novel. The second way is Analytic ethics applied to literature, including the novel. A path is indicated from analysis to form, because these are approaches concentrating on Analytic clarity with regard to what a literary aesthetic object is and how a literary work may serve as an exploration of ethics. Considerations of the form of the novel, as part of the question of genres as different forms within general literary form, are not completely absent, but are secondary. The chapter moves through Analytic aesthetics and more ethically oriented philosophy of literature, before a conclusion which lays out the approach of the book as a whole.

Another related approach is to look at novels, as well as other genres of literature, as ways of exploring ethics as part of life as imagined in the novel. Again the issues of genre are not so much explored, as what is important in literature becomes ethical situations rather than form, which emerges in its most basic ways in the distinctions between genres. This is dealt with below under the heading of ‘Ethics, Poetics, Erotics’, primarily in relation to the work of Martha Nussbaum. Peter Lamarque perhaps fits better with the paradigm of Analytic philosopher than Nussbaum, given that he is more concerned with concepts and boundaries distinguishing non-conceptual work from conceptual work. The distinction between Lamarque and Nussbaum does not undermine the idea of a distinctly Analytic approach though. There are more conceptual and more applied versions of Analytic philosophy, the concern with pure conceptual clarity which guides our understanding of non-conceptual reality is persistent. The following discussion of Lamarque and Nussbaum will establish the need for an approach to the philosophy of the novel more concerned with the interactions between philosophy and literary form, as well as more focused on history and culture. A discussion of Lamarque’s approach to literary criticism is the basis of the section following this section, which sets up issues and outlines the Analytic contribution to literary aesthetics.

Distinguishing between Analytic and Continental European philosophy is notoriously difficult, as we can see just in the fact that one term refers to a way of doing philosophy and the other term refers to a geographical location. There is no neat geographical split between where the two modes exist and there is no neat split between modes of doing philosophy. However, just about everyone knows the difference when they see it, though not in the same way in all cases. A definitional distinction is offered here, with a very rough sketch of relevant philosophical development. No claim made that it will be satisfactory to most people working on the issue. Analytic philosophy is concerned with concepts abstracted from historical and cultural context with regard to logical consistency and clearness of meaning. Some argue that a distinction should be made between Analytic philosophy and Naturalistic philosophy though there are clear overlaps in who engages in these approaches and their historical roots. Philosophers in both of these groups tend to go back to the eighteenth century and look to David Hume (1975, 2000) as the chief precursor. Both groups are concerned with concepts. The ‘pure’ Analytics are concerned with what concepts are separate from their existence in consciousness. The Naturalists are concerned with concepts as they exist in consciousness and in the brain. In twentieth-century philosophy, both can look back to Willard Van Orman Quine, who discussed Analytic and synthetic aspects of concepts, in his essay ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ (in Quine 1980). He questioned the sharpness of the distinction, but not in such a way as to eliminate the distinction. He was also concerned with the evolution of concepts as part of adaptation to the environment and as part of the study of the physiology of perception (Quine 1969). None of this leads him to think of concepts in terms of historical or cultural context, and certainly not the literary use of words. The interest in change and context in Quine is subordinated to the general referential unity of concepts, existing outside context even if contextual use varies. There is a choice of frameworks for organising the world, and the framework as a whole may condition understanding of objects, but language itself is not important to experience and to understanding the world (1960).

The Continental European approach can be traced back to the German thinkers who reacted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, starting with the writings in the 1780s of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Johann Georg Hamann, continuing though the work of Johann Georg Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from the 1790s to the 1840s. What these philosophers both reacted to and continued in Kant was an interest in concepts as produced in the mind, shaping reality. Kant himself, followed by Schelling and Hegel addressed philosophical aesthetics, while in Hamann and Jacobi, philosophy and literary writing interact. This is one major aspect of Continental European philosophy: aesthetic philosophy and literary writing as philosophy are major concerns. Kant’s philosophical aesthetics (2000) is sufficiently concerned with aesthetic qualities, as belonging to objects and as what can be expressed as stable concepts to be taken up within the Analytic philosophy which emerged in the late nineteenth century. In the other German philosophers just mentioned, aesthetics has a historical contextual aspect in which discussion of genres and changes in form is central, with philosophy itself having an aesthetic aspect in its basic attempts to delineate reality.

The Continental European approach itself evolves through continued concern with variability, subjectivity and interpretation, in which philosophy is concerned with its own status and how to write in ways which bring out these aspects. In this approach, concepts are taken to be culturally and historically located, so only fully grasped with attention both to immediate context and the residue of earlier context which still attaches to concepts. There is a tension between: an Analytic search for clarity of meaning and delimitation of possible meanings within any text on one side; and on the other side, a literary theory combined with Continental European Philosophy range of approaches which tend to value extreme plurality of meaning, exploration of the limit of meaning and creative confusion about whether meaning is more an aesthetic experience or more part of philosophy. This is a simplified polarisation and there are philosophers who are difficult to categorise in this way, such as Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but the contrast has considerable value in distinguishing approaches to philosophy. Even in the cases of Husserl and Wittgenstein, it is mostly accepted that the former is ‘Continental’ and the latter is ‘Analytic’.

There is a proportion of the more literary theory and Continental philosophy approaches which are rooted in work by writers concerned with these approaches to non-meaning. Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille both contributed to the literary and philosophical-theoretical sides of this interest, as will be discussed in Chap. 8. While the literary theory and Continental approaches are not so focused on limits of meaning, they are focused on historical, social, political and cultural context. This latter aspect is less the target of Analytic polemic than the limits of focus on meaning content, though the more contextual work still tends to be marginalised as sociological rather than philosophical by Analytic thinkers. Adding the contextualist interest in what is external to the text and its most direct meaning inherently tends to be in some tension with the Analytic approach.

The ethics and literature approach is explored as practiced by philosophers of broadly Analytic orientation. Jonathan Bennett’s article ‘The Moral Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’ stands out as a widely cited text from within Analytic philosophy, though in many cases coming from people self-consciously at the limits of Analytic philosophy, e.g. Stanley Cavell in The Claims of Reason (1979), which is concerned with tragedy rather than the novel, but is suggestive for the reading of the novel, or those whose work has included history of philosophy, e.g. Martha Nussbaum, who is discussed in detail below. There is much more of this kind of material from literary critics, political and legal theorists and other disciplines distinct from philosophy, if overlapping with it. This tells a story in itself. Nussbaum’s work is the most influential body of relevant work and this to a large degree comes out of a classics background, so a background covering philological and literary critical approaches to text.

The tendency with Analytic philosophers is to see literature as a way of dealing with moral problems and that tends to be reductive in relation to the complexity of the novelistic text. While reduction is inevitable in some form when dealing with theory and philosophy of literature, seeking an approach to a moral problem as the essential aspect of a narrative is a constitutively reductive situation and inevitably tends to direct attention to the moral problem, rather than all the interpretative possibilities of the novel in question.

There is some creative interaction with the other work Analytic philosophers do, which often brings very short narrative thought experiments into arguments about political philosophy, such as John Rawls on ‘the veil of ignorance’ in A Theory of Justice (1971); metaphysics, such as Saul Kripke on natural kinds and essences in Naming and Necessity (1972); semantics, such as Hilary Putnam in ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ (1975); epistemology, such as Edmund Gettier in ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ (1963). These are, however, very far from novels and do not include any reflection on the nature of narrative fictional or the style and form of storytelling. Analytic writers on aesthetics are at least sometimes inclined to see narrative, including the novel, as not as inherently aesthetic as some other forms such as music and painting and this fits with the tendency for literature and ethics to be more about the ethics than the literature.

The Analytic approach in particular, is less open to the way that literary forms and concepts of literary understanding evolve over time in comparison with the more essayistic, literary, historical, subjective ways and ambiguous ways of writing philosophy. Though the topic of genre might seem suitable for conceptual analysis and narrative schema, literary genre in all cases and certainly in the case of the novel needs the qualities in philosophy, not so obvious in Analytic approaches.

Peter Lamarque provides a significant example of Analytic philosophy dealing with a literary critical approach informed by Continental European philosophy. His general approach to literary narrative is to emphasise some fixity of meaning determined by context. He does deal with the possibility of an unbounded sense of writing in his earlier book The Philosophy of Literature (2009) drawing on his 1990 article ‘The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy’, particularly with regard to ‘écriture’ in Roland Barthes, concentrating on the essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (in Barthes 1977a), though Barthes discusses it in various longer texts (1968, 1974). Lamarque also excludes Jacques Derrida’s understanding of ‘écriture’ in Writing and Difference (1978), Of Grammatology (1997) and so on, which has been more influential and which offers an account that takes the issue of ‘writing’ into philosophy, social science and the humanities in general, as well as literary studies. Barthes’ account is elegant but rather less philosophically extended. Lamarque recognises the value of an account of writing as unconstrained by authorial intentions and rigid determination of meaning, but argues that it is less successful as a way of thinking about literature than the contextualism he advocates. The contextualism offers constraints of interpretation which keep the text meaningful. That is because contextualism, with regard to the circumstance of writing and plausible references, suggests distinctive fixed interpretations of a text, or any aesthetic object, it prevents the text collapsing into a series of signs which are arbitrary in meaning and can be taken in any way in a subjective decisionistic way. This is perhaps something of a parody of Barthes, along with the work by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Lamarque associates with Barthes.

The culmination of Barthes’ work on literary narrative is S/Z (1974), an exhaustive analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrassine. This takes the writer most associated with literary Realism, with literary writing that apparently represents social reality, away from this kind of mimesis towards desire and death disrupting our grasp of reality. The centre of the story is a man, Sarrasine, who falls in love with a beautiful opera singer, in Italy, who he fails to understand is a castrato rather than a woman. Sarrasine is ultimately murdered on the orders of the castrato’s ‘protector’, a cardinal. The story is a story within a story, appropriate to a sense of a world that is all fictions with no reality. The whole story reverberates with a sense of uncanny uneasiness with regard to desire, beauty, death, emasculation, art, sexual difference and the darkness at the centre of nineteenth-century progress. All of this is brought out by Barthes, who reduces reality to an effect of one code amongst five in literature, but who does nothing to undermine the sense of representation of a social world in Balzac. What Barthes emphasises is that here Balzac heightens uncertainty about reality and our basic distinctions to the point at which stability of meaning may be...